I am Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics. Ask me anything!

I’m Steve Levitt, University of Chicago economics professor and author of Freakonomics.

Steve Levitt here, and I’ll be answering as many questions as I can starting at noon EST for about an hour. I already answered one favorite reddit question—click here to find out why I’d rather fight one horse-sized duck than 100 duck-sized horses.
You should ask me anything, but I’m hoping we get the chance to talk about my latest pet project, FreakonomicsExperiments.com. Nearly 10,000 people have flipped coins on major life decisions—such as quitting their jobs, breaking up with their boyfriends, and even getting tattoos—over the past month. Maybe after you finish asking me about my life and work here, you’ll head over to the site to ask a question about yourself.

Dr. Levitt, thanks for doing an AmA!
If you don't mind sharing I'm sure several of us would be interested in your opinion on setting the federal minimum wage at $9-$10/hr.
(Will it help create/destroy jobs, inflation, etc.)
Thanks again!

On global warming, we argued that there was no way that moral suasion was going to win the day. (this was right before the Copenhagen conference.) We argued that cutting carbon is too costly, too slow, and it is already too late. Instead, we believe that ultimately the answer to climiate change will be geo-engineering. We believe it makes sense to invest now in experiments that will help us learn how to save the planet when we decide we need to.

I think your work is definitely thought provoking and interesting. However, I think you made a little too much effort to be "thought provoking" when it came to your discussions of climate research.

Your pithy style works well for a lot of the "correlations" you note and dive into. Climate research is a very mature and widely expansive field of knowledge and it was a mistake to try and treat it similarly.

My friend graduated with a bachelors in Economics 5 years ago and is flipping burgers at McDonald's. I feel like he has given up hope. Do you have any suggestions for him as far as the best jobs to take starting out or something he can pursue in that field?

My basic feeling is that businesses just dont use economic thinking at all. If you can think like a freak, but do it in a business setting, you will have great success.

But you need to get into a job where somebody will listen to you. My best advice is to figure out what you love, and then just be singleminded in your attempt to somehow do something related to it. Even if you don't make a ton of money, at least you will have fun along the way, which is the most important thing in my opinion.

My statistics class just recently finished reading your book, so thanks for doing an AMA! One of the things we were discussing about was if government's current view on guns is a misconception on their part. Do you think the promotion of gun safety awareness or removing guns from stores will cause a drop in gun violence in the near future?

EDIT: I didn't know you have already talked about this subject, but can you nonetheless answer this question for those who don't have current access to the podcast?

My view, which basically has to be true, is that NOTHING that the government does to the flow of new guns can possibly affect gun violence much. There are already 300 million guns out there! They will be around for the next 50 years. The cat is out of the bag.

we published some studies on car seats. But we never made any headway on public policy.

I did get the Secretary of Transportation to blog about me. Basically he said I was an idiot and refused to give authority to his 100 statisticians to use his own data to see whether maybe we were right.

What is your response to the criticism that you haven't taken into account appropriate use (i.e. that the problem with car seats is that they are used incorrectly most of the time, whether because they are not installed correctly in the car, the child is not strapped in properly, or they are being used for children who don't meet the age/weight/height requirements)?

Being one of those rare parents who actually has read the manual and the best practice recommendations, I'm horrified at how few parents I see personally using car seats correctly... and worse yet is those that cite Freakonomics as a reason not to bother. Are you concerned that people might misunderstand your contentions and put their children at greater risk?

we debated forever, but finally decided to write a third freakonomics book. but it will be different. I think people were getting tired of us after the second book. And for good measure, we are also writing a fourth book, on golf! with Luke Donald and his coach Pat Goss. Believe it or not, that is what gets me out of bed in the morning.

The biggest decision I've ever made with a coin toss is whether or not to do this ask me anything!

My most eventful coin toss was on my wedding day. My best man gave me a quarter and told me to make
a wish and toss the coin into a fountain. I flipped the coin into the fountain, and it hit a rock, and
richocheted back at me onto the ground. We didn't take that as such a good omen for my marriage.

Me and my girlfriend listened to hours of freakonomics on a recent road trip. We got hooked!

I remember one episode where you said that you don't fully believe the Stanford prison experiment, that the outcome of a study depends on who administers the study. Have you ever thought about administering a study while pretending to be a psychologist to test this?

Looking at the Freakonomics Experiment it seems like there is a large potential for self selection out of the sample if people decide they don't like the result of the coin flip, how do you account for this in the results?

Even if people don't follow the coin toss (we know not everyone will), our experimental design is fine as long as people will still fill out our follow-up surveys. That's why we are offering all sorts of Freako swag, even all-expense paid visits to Chicago to have dinner with me, and thousands of dollars, so people will fill out the surveys.

Dr. Levitt, I'm an undergraduate economics student and your work is what first sparked my interest in the subject. What advice do you have for someone who wants to work in economics? Where do you find inspiration in the field?

the sad fact is that if you want to succeed in academic economics these days, the most important thing is to be good at math. I think that is a terrible development...economics should be about the ideas, not the math. But very few of my colleagues agree with me.

Mr. Levitt, In one of your blog posts you state "For every mile walked drunk, turns out to be eight times more dangerous than the mile driven drunk."

Now, I understand the mathematics behind this. I also understand completely that you are not condoning drunk driving. But I always found the logic behind this to be suspect. Drunk driving doesn't just hurt you. In the case of an accident, it also potentially hurts or kills those in the car with you, and those in any automobiles that you crash into. These factors aren't present with the drunk walker.

If you posit simply a lone driver on an empty road, your conclusion makes sense. But that's not the case in the real world. So I'm curious. Do you still stand by your conclusion and, if so, how do you account for the extra factors present in a drunk driving situation that aren't present in a drunk walking scenario?

I've spoken a lot about gun control. It is one issue where I tend not to make people that mad, because I don't take either side. I say I like guns (which I do), but I also offer ways to punish bad behavior with guns.

The guy Stetson Kennedy, who had purportedly infiltrated the Klan, hadn't really done it himself. I think he got caught up in his own stories and decade by decade they got more exaggerated. When we got wind of this, we felt we had to lay bare our mistake.

I think that the basic ideas of economics are incredibly powerful. But what disappoints me is that the academic side of things is so abstract and mathematical. There currently is very little taste for creativity or ideas.

what i think we really need is for people to pay a big chunk of their own health care costs so the whole system starts to act more like a market and less like an entitlement. when health care is 20% of GDP, we can't treat it like an all you can eat buffet.

I think big data is definitely the future. I'm not sure it holds the key to human relationships, but I do think it holds the key to big profits for the firms that figure out how to use it. It is amazing how bad companies are right now in this dimension.